August 29, 2007

Horrors! But didn't you know this already? And don't whine that this means you have to be a vegetarian. Animal rights folk are trying to make it look that way:

“You just cannot be a meat-eating environmentalist,” said Mr. Prescott, whose group also plans to send billboard-toting trucks to the Colorado Convention Center in Denver when Mr. Gore lectures there on Oct. 2. The billboards will feature a cartoon image of Mr. Gore eating a drumstick next to the tagline: “Too Chicken to Go Vegetarian? Meat Is the No. 1 Cause of Global Warming.”

But no one tells you to give up driving, only to drive less or drive a car that uses less gas. So eat meat less often and eat smaller portions.

Cutting back on meat is fine. Polluting less is fine. The best solution to most of our problems though is cutting world population. Al Gore talked about the CO2/temperature hockey stick curve. What about the population growth curve? That's a lot more scary than a 2 degree rise in temperature (which will probably start dropping in a few years anyway--see "Canadians For Global Warming").

The best solution to most of our problems though is cutting world population. ... What about the population growth curve?

Interesting topic.

Between now and 2050, there surely is predicted (alway barring x, y, z etc.) a growth in population of something like a billion and third. But at least according to one source, the net growth at the 2050 mark in more developed countries is estimated to be at about 6 million individual people. In developing countries, it's estimated to be something like ... well, a billion and a third (the 6 million being essentially insignificant).

How do you plan to deal with that one, pardner? Huge-ass snake's nest, don't you think?

For starters, in terms of even speaking to (speaking up about) the challenge--not exactly OK, on many, many, many levels, in the current political climate here, or anywhere in the world.

And that'd be just part of the lead-up for getting to the point where it'd be possible to actually address the issue at hand.

Althouse, I am glad to see your sensible comment to the article, less meat in your diet can make a difference. You do not seem to agree with the point by many of your readers that GW is a joke and a cult. The environmental benefits of eating less meat are beyond global warming; less water pollution, less deforestation, and more. I think that these groups are trying to advance their cause through the GW tie-in; I am disappointed that the environmental groups are not also pitching this point but I bet they don’t want to turn away the trendy environmentalist (financial contributors) who still like their prime rib and big macs.

FWIW, I'm a practicing omnivore--who doesn't require or eat meat every day. My husband is a philosophical vegetarian. My son was raised vegetarian for his first few years, and then fish was added to his diet (and it stopped there), though not on a daily basis.

That shouldn't make any difference in terms of the point I was trying make ... but just in case it does ... .

It's the year 2022, global warming, overpopulation, unresolved pollution issues and depleted natural resources plague the world. E.G. Robinson makes his last film appearance. His character, Sol Roth, marvels over a small tough steak.

that U.N. report is an impartial, unimpeachable source of statements we can quote

*snicker*

Wish they had compared emissions generated by livestock to agri. We run a farm outside of Houston - cattle, cotton and grain - and I would be surprised if the difference was that significant. Sorry, but the GW warnings seem like saving your spare pennies to pay off the national debt...

This is all going to wind up like the Muscovites burning their own furniture to survive the winter, because the politburo elites diverted all the timber to build dachas on the Black Sea. We'll all be veggies peddling our bikes to work, while people like Gore and Edwards zoom past in their SUVs on their way to the local Steakhouse.

A person riding alone, not wearing hemp, and idling his Hummer at a McDonald’s drive-through to get a double Quarter Pounder with cheese and an order of Chicken McNuggets should get quadruple anti-GW hysteria credits.

Agent Smith, the ultimate environmentalist ~ ''I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we... are the cure.''

Is it okay now to start socially ostracizing anybody who identifies themselves as an "activist"? Because I swannee it's like everybody I meet / read about / see on tv so self-identified is a noisome intrusive busybody horrified by non-conformity and pathologically incapable of closely examining their own beliefs, much less taking a honest measure of other's.

Maybe with this threat to the meat industry, the farm lobby will climb down off the GW bandwagon that they had climbed upon in order to sell corn for ethanol.

The next step is abolishing having children, because that is one of the worst things that you can do for carbon emissions, etc.

Of course, it is the countries that need young people the worst to support their aging populations that are most likely to fall for this. And note that though the Earth hasn't hit ZPG yet for its human population, it is sliding in there. Most of the world's population is now in countries that have seen their growth rates plummet, including, notably, the biggest two. For most of the countries on the Earth, no longer than 40-50 years from now, and their populations are going to start dropping - in many cases preciptitously.

But since I am a GW sceptic, and I like meat, I don't see myself changing my actions in the near future.

Some of you have touted the healthy effects of eating less meat. Let me point out the problem with that assumption. What you are likely concerned with is the fact that a high cholesterol diet would raise your total cholesterol and LDL numbers. This has yet to be substantiated despite many years of observation. Even if such a diet did raise these numbers, your risk of a cardiac event over a 10 years period is only elevated by about 1 to 2%. Now if you did eat a diet rich in meat, one of your many cholesterol numbers would go up. That happens to be your HDL cholesterol. This element is known as "good cholesterol". You desire to have it as high as possible. If your HDL cholesterol is low that is associated with a risk of a cardiac event over 10 years of about 10 to 15%.

You see, as with much of our perception of the way things are, we are very much misinformed. This is not your fault as the government is active in this misinformation as are organizations such as the American Heart Association and the various drug companies that sell statins or drugs that are intended to lower cholesterol but have little effect on HDL.

Some studies have even pointed to rather harmful effects of not eating enough cholesterol and fats but these are not popular in our society. A high protein, high fat diet is actually better for you than the high carbohydrate foods that we are forced to eat.

Modernization and population growth drive CO2 buildup. The world is running out of available fossil fuel, arable land, and in some regions/continents, water.

Habitat loss is putting us on the verge of a new wave of mass extinction of wildlife - again, driven by population growth and modernization.

All the "exciting new alternate power sources" besides being unreliable, drops in the bucket - do not allow us to escape population growth and modernization.

Even nuclear power, if accepted, does not allow us to escape this Malthusian trap.

Conservation means little when population growth wipes out gains. And all conservation and "use less" means if carried out further and furher, is lowered standards of living and everyone living like a family in Malawi. America's environmentalists have mostly decided that immigration and global population growth are taboo subjects.

Supply side Republican religious right whackos now have a creed that America going from 300 million to 363 in 2030 to 420 million in 2050 to 700 million in 2100 - is "great"! It will make America "richer and more competetive and better able to 'win" over China. But mention state-imposed population control like China's may be needed to save civilizations and prevent mass extermination of species - and they look at you like you are dunking a crucifix in a jar of urine.

We are headed into ugly days ahead.

Meat-eating is another trivial distraction. It won't matter if no one eats meat if it just delays the day when mankind grows enough in population to wipe out any such conservation - and the days where major ecosystems are destroyed for both us and other species begin...

It's not simply the eating of meat, but the raising of meat that causes the problem. Meaning that its' really the animals that are the issue. Because while they are being raised to be slaughtered they are just farting too much and releasing massive quantities of methane.Clearly the solution then is to kill all the animals that are causing this catastrophe. It's not an overabundance of humans that are the cause but the overabudance of cows and sheep. Do away with them all.Does the world really need all those cows? When the environment is at stake? And since we're going to kill them anyway I say steaks for everyone. Wear a leather belt to fight global warming.Since we can't kill all the cows at once (well we could but then we'd be worse than Michael Vick) in a massive bovine genocide, we have to kill them where we can. Eat a cow to fight global warming. Stop the cows wanton destruction of the environment. Do it for the children.

paul ciotti wrote:Cutting back on meat is fine. Polluting less is fine. The best solution to most of our problems though is cutting world population

So then clearly the solution is to kill the environmentalists. Someone has to go. Since they are the ones highlighting the issue they should make the sacrifices necessary to combat the issue. I don't drive an SUV, the least they can do is give up their lives for something they believe in.

Isn't this kind of like the chicken hawk argument but for the environment? The antiwar crowd says that senators should be sending their sons and daughters to war, and if they don't or if they believe in the war and dont' serve they are chicken hawks. Shouldn't the same hold true for environmentalists, especially those saying we should have less population?

Environmetalists first my friend.In the meantime, I'm about to have a nice steak for lunch.

I'm getting a little tired of the "population bomb" nonsense. People, it is debunked. In the last century we've gone from one to six billion producing more food per person and getting richer the whole time.

It's kind of funny now, to go back and read "The Caves of Steel" about the horrors of a world with... EIGHT BILLION people!

Population growth rates are falling all over the world, and First World nations are seeing a net decline.

This is not 1974. Nothing that the population alarmists claimed would happen has.

Because more mouths to feed means more hands to work and more brains to think.

Eat meat, don't eat meat; drive SUVs, drive hydrids, walk; ultimately the planet has a finite amount of resources for an ever expanding number of people. All strategies seem to be based around stretching those resources, but this ignores the core problem, all of humanity's eggs are in one basket. Whether the catastrophy of the week is valid or not, you still have to pay it some attention, since it's a zero sum game. You'd think environmentalists would be in favor of building an escape hatch, building enclaves off planet, if for no other reasons than a)no native fragile ecosystems to screw up, and b)giving humanity an alternate place to live reduces the pressure on this ecosystem since all of us don't need to live HERE. That, by the way, is what answers the population question.

I am against market based solutions based on arbitrary and contrived markets. I was trying to be funny and sarcastic. To the global warming alarmist crowd, the entire global warming script is their religion. They have a high priest in Al Gore, they have scriptures in "consensus and peer-reviewed studies" and they have indulgences with carbon credits. They could expand their indulgences to include meat consumption.

Obviously you're not aware of the scientific consensus concerning overpopulation. They have computer models showing how there will be 20 billion people on the planet by 1996. You can run them yourself on your Apple ][. Don't be a denier.